prima vera

My greenhouse at the moment gladdens my heart.  When I open the door I am greeted with the humming fug of growing plants.  Many of them now no longer need their little plastic propagator lids, and are stretching boldly out of the earth.  I am fascinated by the power of the nascent plant that is within the seed to push its way out of its husk into the earth, then out of the earth into the air, just from the encouragement of warmth and water. 

I have 100 percent germination of my potimarron and mini red turban squashes.  I am delighted because these are the squashes I fell in love with in a French auberge in the summer.  The mini red turban in particular is a fabulous vegetable, beautiful because of its irregularities.
 

The broad bean seeds I kept from the delicious broad beans I cropped last year have all germinated.  I also have success with my peas and other squashes.  The dwarf French bean Royalty has not been so successful.  All the seeds germinated, but half of them are sad brown mutants.  I can't work out what went wrong.  They may have got scorched by the sun as they first sprouted from the soil, but none of the other seedlings has been affected.  I may write to the RHS My Garden forum about it. 

There is no sign of germination of my very hot chilli seeds - 'Ring of Fire'.  This is very sad, because I killed off the first lot of wonderfully healthy seedlings by leaving them outside for the frost to do its worst.  It's now too late to sow more.  My brother posesses the last surviving seedling, so hopefully his will thrive to make up for it all. 

The biggest surpise for me is that the honeydew melon seeds have germinated.  They were just seeds from a melon that had been discarded in a compost heap.  I must have got the conditions just right in the greenhouse without even trying.  I am glad that something that was thrown away has been given the chance of life. 

Not a quince

When I first took on the small allotment, I was intrigued about the identity of the tiny tree which greets people as they enter.  It matched the tiny shed very well.  I was hoping it would be a quince, as I started to tend one that bows over my boundary on my long allotment, before I realised it was maintained by somebody else. 

However, now it is blooming, its true identity is revealed.  It is a child of the large plum tree nearby,  having grown up from its roots.  In fact there is a whole line of them stretching accross the allotments, so you can trace where the parent root is under the ground.  This plum tree has the most delicious plums I have ever tasted in the summer.  I gorged myself on them in a quite shameful manner last year.  It was a compulsion  - one was never enough, and I would reach to dangerous heights, balanced precariously, just to have another taste of the honeyed sweetness.  They made an excellent open topped tart, but nothing could beat the taste of them fresh. 

So I am very happy to discover that I have my own tiny version of the plum tree.  I wonder if it will have a good crop this year.  I think I will be kind and give it a feed of chicken manure and bone meal.